Mobile Technology Had A Very Merry Christmas

According to research from Flurry Analytics, more iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day than any other day of the year, and there were more activations of iPhones, iPads, Galaxy devices, Kindle Fires, and others, than any other day in history.

The firm claims to detect over 90% of all new iOS and Android device activations on a daily basis, thanks to 260,000 apps which utilize Flurry Analytics. Based on its numbers, here's what the day looked like compared to the average of the first 20 days of the month:

"In order to appreciate the magnitude of new devices activated on Christmas Day, Flurry established a baseline using the average from the first 20 days of December," says Flurry's Peter Farago in a blog post. "Over this period, daily activations averaged around 4.0 million per day, with variance of a few hundred thousand in either direction per day. On Christmas Day, activations soared to more than 17.4 million, a 332% increase over the December baseline. By comparison, Christmas Day 2011 held the previous single-day record, having reached 6.8 million device activations. Christmas 2012 is more than 2.5 times larger than Christmas 2011, which surpassed its own baseline by more than 300%."

Flurry also looked at app downloads on Christmas compared to the average of the first 20 days of December:

One very interesting thing the company found is that tablet activations were actually greater than smartphone activations. According to Flurry's numbers, tablets beat out smartphones 51% to 49%, though for the first 20 days of the month, it was a much different picture at 20% to 80%.